Many modern appliances, consumer devices, and other devices include embedded systems that are configured to perform one or more dedicated functions. However, most embedded systems of such devices do not include networking capabilities, role based access control capabilities, remote interface capabilities, remote control capabilities, or related capabilities. Designing such functionality into an embedded system, designing application programming interfaces (APIs) for accessing such functionality, designing web services capable of communicating with and controlling the embedded system via this added functionality, and designing applications for taking advantage of this functionality can consume considerable resources of the device manufacturer. Moreover, traditional embedded systems do not perform actions in response to events on other embedded systems satisfying one or more rules of a rules engine or in response to external events satisfying one or more rules defined by a consumer or original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of the embedded device.